Stay
by Meeerf
Summary: Cecil and Rosa were the perfect couple... or were they? Rydia's not so sure. Oneshot playing with an irregular pairing. Cecil x Rydia.


**Disclaimer:**I do not own the characters of Final Fantasy II/IV. I just abuse them for my own devious purposes on fanfiction sites.

**Author's Note: **I'm usually a Rydia/Kain shipper, but I always found Cecil attractive, and Rosa slightly vapid. In FFIV, Rydia is left blissfully unpaired - It's clear Edge is interested in her , but not at all vice versa. Rydia's a little bit sassy, and that's all you really get. So... an alternative suggestion...

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Rydia slithered through the corridors of Castle Baron. Slithering was not necessarily what she was trying to do, but the slender, shimmery dresses she had become accustomed to wearing, the uniform of a summoner, did tend to make one move in a certain way. It was not until she returned to the surface that she realized her garments were tremendously appealing to human males.

Not that she cared. She ran her fingers through short, wavy emerald hair. For a brief while she had thought of growing it out, envisioning the waves of green spilling over her shoulders like a princess, but it itched and was heavy and annoyed her. She took a pocketknife to it one day and chopped it roughly back to her shoulders. She would not try to pretend to be something she was not. She was no queen or princess, she was a caller, and by the crystals, she would look like one.

This had been nothing more than a routine visit for her, at least at the start. She had left the Land of the Summoned Monsters a year after returning from the moon, ready to return to the surface of the Blue Planet once again. She knocked on the door before her absentmindedly, lost in her memories.

"We can teach you no more here," Asura told her. "Go, and be our link to the world of humans once again. Bring Mist back to what it was. Bring the Callers back to this world."

And so she had, taking in pupils to the scorched town in the mountains, teaching them the rudiments of what the town's past inhabitants would have known from birth. Painstaking, but necessary.

All this drifted through her head in the corridors of Baron, the country that promised to defend her new realm.

There was more than that, though. The real reason she had come here was Cecil.

He opened the door and a smile crossed his face at the sight of her in silent greeting. She grinned back, and he stepped out of the King's chambers, the two turning to amble through the towers, as they had done every night in the months she had been in Baron. The time alone with her, Rydia knew, was one of the only times Cecil could be something other than King.

Cecil... the first time she had met him, she had only been a child, and she could only vaguely remember the day her village had destroyed, but in those hazy memories she could clearly recall him shouting at Kain that he would protect her. The girl she had been was at first suspicious of that man, her self-appointed protector, she scared and alone in a world of strangers, but somehow found herself clinging to the dark knight as her lifeline.

She had accompanied Cecil to gain the Sandruby he needed to cure Rosa of her illness. The young woman had been found delirious in the desert village of Kaipo, having fled through the desert without food or water looking for her beloved. Reunited, the two of them had seemed the perfect pair in her young mind, an adopted mother and father, and for a while she could indulge herself in the safe and secure world they offered.

But her new peace was shattered soon enough, when Rosa was kidnapped and ransomed by their enemies, and Leviathan had shipwrecked her other friends to find her and plummet her down to the land of the summoned monsters. The memories kept her up at night, not knowing if her friends had survived, but like all things, they had faded with time as she became accustomed to her new existence.

Years went by.

Or so it was for her, until the day she had been sent back to the world above, to help the friends who were now only vague memories. Stealing a glance at the man beside her, she studied her host with interest, remembering their reaction to seeing her as a grown woman, seventeen years instead of seven. But, she supposed, in times where the earth itself was threatened, one got used to such unusual happenings, and soon enough she was accepted as peer rather than child.

Cecil had the hardest time with that, she thought, and still every once in a while he had to stop himself from treating her as a little girl all over again. It didn't help that she barely came to his shoulder.

"You're pretty scrappy, for someone so little," he teased her affectionately one day.

"I had to be, to put up with all of you guys," she joked right back.

The laugh she received was worth the effort. She knew her presence helped Cecil nurse his broken heart.

"I wish you could stay here forever," he had told her that day, throwing one arm around her slender shoulders in a brotherly gesture.

"I wish I could, too, Cecil, but... there's Mist, the callers..."

His face clouded slightly, and she watched his desires war with the Paladin within, the part of him that thought only of others. "You're right... it is our duty to right the wrongs that have been instigated by our enemies..."

It was exactly what she expected him to say, but it annoyed her nonetheless.

Rydia studied him, discreetly, during the afternoons they spent together. She wasn't so terribly knowledgeable about such things, but she had figured out that Cecil was what most women would consider extremely attractive. His features were chiseled, his eyes soft, and the white hair that fell in waves to his shoulders, lighter even than his peach-porcelain skin... his finely muscled body was apparent even under the royal doublet he now wore instead of armor. He looked the part of a king.

And Rosa would have looked the part of a queen beside him. She had always been touchingly beautiful, tall, slender, and nearly as pale, with those light blond locks falling below her waist. When she returned as a young woman, Rydia found herself inadvertently comparing herself to the delicate White Wizard, and feeling somewhat awkward and inelegant beside her, even more so for Rosa's warm welcome towards her. Together, she and Cecil had looked like a match made in heaven.

But things were not always what they seemed.

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It had been a surprise when Rosa had left.

"Maybe she was too pure for a Dark Knight like me all along," Cecil told Rydia one evening. "Paladin or not, she can't forget who I once was."

_And yet she loved me anyway_, he thought to himself. She had been committed to him with a single-minded devotion that he knew now he had mistaken for love. It had seemed so obvious to him, they had known each other all their lives, and he had assumed they would be together for the rest of their lives as well. He had dreamed of her as his queen, of their children, ruling the kingdom by his side.

But she had other plans.

"I'm going to Mysidia," she had broken the news to him one day, in one swift move crushing all his dreams of their future together.

In retrospect, it was not so terribly surprising. She had suffered in the clutches of their enemies, and on some level, she really wasn't the same person he once had known. He had reached ever more for the light; it was not surprising she would as well.

So now she was in Mysidia, studying ever higher levels of white magic, and he had heard she would most likely take over for the Elder one day. But though he had spent months trying to deny it, he knew she would not be coming back.

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It felt strange, Rydia thought, just the two of them together, with Rosa gone to Mysidia, Kain somewhere on Mt. Ordeals, and Edge ruling Eblan. Edge still pursued her, sending her flowery letters professing his love, but her heart just wasn't in it, and she brushed it off the way she would a mosquito.

Her memories of Cecil felt awkward, girlish still, some part of her still remembering him as the man who had saved her. To the young survivor of Mist, it had stirred all sorts of admiration.

But now that she was older, it began to stir... something else.

Beyond the Cecil of her memories, she began to see not just the Cecil she had built up in her mind, but the Cecil who was just an ordinary man before her. And she contemplated him...

He was kind, certainly, but occasionally prone to moments of darkness. Not surprising, she thought to herself. Finding out not only you had a brother, but he had become a pawn of evil forces of darkness was bound to have an effect on a person.

"Do you remember anything of Golbez?" she asked him.

Cecil let his eyes grow distant. "Sometimes I think I do, and sometimes I think I'm just making up memories to fill the gaps I don't have. I grew up with my mother, so... he must have grown up with my father somewhere... and sometimes I can almost see a face... sometimes I can almost hear a voice..."

The Paladin laughed bitterly then. "If it was anyone but you, Rydia, I wouldn't even admit to this, but... it was a little while after Rosa... left... Anyway, I was in my rooms one night, looking into the night sky, and suddenly, as clear as if he was in the room, I could have sworn I heard him say... goodbye..."

He looked down at the Caller then, haunted seriousness furrowing his brow. "That was the last night the second moon was ever seen."

Rydia felt chills tickling her spine, and she plopped down on the bench in the courtyard garden they had been walking through. A fountain gurgled in the center, and as she propped head on hands, elbows resting on her legs, she forced herself to focus on the gently running water.

Cecil sat beside her, suddenly concerned. "Hey... I didn't mean to worry you..." he started, all protector once again.

Rydia remained silent, and a worried Cecil slid an arm around her. It was not the touch, but its firmness that surprised her at first, and she barely restrained a flinch before sinking into his comforting grasp.

It was long minutes before she spoke.

"I think of things too," she told him. "At least you get something that might have happened. I try to think what might have happened, if I had been in Mist this whole time, if I had grown up around humans, instead of the summoned monsters... I'll never know what it's like to grow up the way everyone else did..."

She turned away to hide the tears she was stifling, only to find Cecil's other arm slinking around her to pull her tight. He leaned in very close to her, and she could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek. Together, they sat in silent understanding.

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Cecil found himself grateful to have Rydia around. He wasn't someone who liked to be alone. He wanted someone around, needed someone who would understand him.

Of course, there were a million women in Baron ready to try and fill the spot in his heart Rosa had left. But he did not fool himself into thinking they wanted anything from him more than the king they saw before them.

Rydia was like a breath of fresh air compared to those. There was never any subterfuge with her, she always said exactly what was on her mind with the clarity of an innocence that still remained in her even after all they had experienced together.

Every time she started to mention going back to Mist, he would find some way to keep her in Baron. Perhaps a bit manipulative, but he kept wanting to keep her near, one more day, then one more after that.

She could not be more different from Rosa, he thought to himself. But then again, he had thought Rosa was perfect; but in the end, she wasn't perfect for him.

Despite himself, he found himself comparing the two women, and more and more he found fault with Rosa. She had always tried to care for him, but at times it felt absolutely smothering, like she was trying to get something back from him. It seemed she needed him far more than he needed her. He had thought she was courageous, when she had joined him in his quest; but now he wondered if she wasn't only following after him.

Rydia was nothing of the sort. He listened, fascinated, to her story of being taken down into the underground by Leviathan, an orphaned slip of a girl taken further away from her own world. And she had adapted, admirably, and after making that her home, had returned once again to where she was needed. And after it all was over, she found her way back to the land of the summoned monsters once again, only to choose to return finally to her home.

There was no taming this girl, he knew. She would always go her own way, to find her destiny wherever it may take her.

But an inkling of an idea had formed in his mind. Destiny could mean a great many things. His destiny had been nothing like he had ever expected, but here he was, the King of Baron. A guilty twinge led him to wonder if Rydia's destiny might lead her to be a queen.

He teased her with it one night, and the look she gave him was part amused and part withering. "Me, a Queen?" she had laughed. "Of what? The monsters, maybe. I don't know enough about humans."

But Cecil knew better. In the tiny body of the Caller, was everything one could want in a Queen - and even more he could want for himself.

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They had always been friends, Rydia knew, but now they were friends in a different way, knowing each other not just through their trials and battles, but having the casual opportunity to understand really what was inside each other, things that were not entirely obvious on the surface.

How close friends, she had not yet realized.

Rydia and Cecil had found themselves laughing together over dinner one evening, and on impulse, Rydia had grabbed his hand, tugging him after her. He resisted unconsciously at first, but finally he let her lead him up onto the walls of Baron Castle, where the remaining moon shone over the ramparts brightly.

Cecil gazed at that moon, and Rydia might have wondered what he was thinking, had she not already known.

The moon drew her as well, and she gazed at its cool blue light, thinking of the past, present, and future. Suddenly she was drawn out of her reverie by the sudden pressure of Cecil's arm around her waist, pulling the tiny woman closer to him.

She turned her head with trepidation, to see that perfect face looking down at hers, looking into big dark eyes under wild green hair. What she saw then, was something she had never seen before, but it hit her heart before she could stop it.

Rydia looked back at Cecil with a questioning look in her eyes.

"Stay," he asked her. "Stay forever, and be with me."

The Paladin leaned in close to her, the diminutive Caller not sure what to do next, her mind crying out that this was Cecil, and he belonged to Rosa. But that was all past, and she threw her arms around him before she could stop herself.

As their lips met, Rydia closed her eyes to dream. Not yet, she thought, she had to much to do still, but somehow, she knew she was going to find her way to Baron once again. And the next time, she would never leave.


End file.
